Supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy are privately blaming aggressive campaigning by Bill Clinton for her recent decline in Iowa’s pre-caucus polls.

In their opinion, the former president’s strong defense of his wife pushes the contest for the Democratic nomination toward what Hillary Clinton wanted to avoid: a referendum on the Clinton administration, making her a symbol of the past rather than an agent of change.

A footnote: Democrats close to Bill Clinton blame Mark Penn, Sen. Clinton’s chief strategist, for her decline. They grumble that Penn, a professional pollster, relies too much on polls.

Source:  Townhall

For such a clever gal, that’s a bit of a blunder.

At a rally featuring her husband, former President Bill Clinton on Saturday, campaign workers asked supporters to sign and mail cards that said "Yes! I’m an Iowan for Hillary" with their contact information as well as other supportive friends.

One small problem. In the upper right-hand corner of the card, it says "I, _____, pledge to support Hillary Clinton at my precinct caucus on January 14, 2008."

Unfortunately, that’s 11 days too late.

Source: Suitably Flip

Once it was about Hillary, but now, of course, it’s about Bill.

Our ubiquitous ex-president is playing his favorite uxorious game, and it goes like this: Let’s create chaos and then get out of it together. You ride to my rescue or I ride to yours. We come within an inch of dying and then recapture the day by the skin of our teeth. While we’re killing ourselves, we blame everyone else. We’ll be heroes.

It worked for Bill and Hillary in ’92 and ’96. It didn’t work in the health care debacle. Will it work in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

“For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,” said a friend of the Clintons, “Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.”

Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt. And certainly he feels that his legacy is tied to her. He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?

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“Good Morning, Mrs. President”

… Just before Decorating Saturday, I ran into some of my old team members from the previous Christmas…

“You aren’t missing anything. You wouldn’t believe what they’re calling ‘Christmas decorations’ this year. It’s unbelievable. In fact, it’s downright disgraceful. There’s this one ornament, a clear lucite block, and inside are some old computer parts, and that’s a Christmas ornament, see?”

My other former team member chimed in, “Yeah, it’s true, and there’s all of this carved dark wood, not resembling much of anything—just sticks and twigs tied together. They look like fertility gods or something. We can’t tell.”

“Yeah, and there are pots, and carvings, some that look kind of obscene, and boxes, but nowhere can we find anything that resembles Christmas. Nowhere.”

“And have you seen Bertha?”

Yes, I had seen Bertha—big, ebony Bertha. Bertha was a statue that Hillary had selected to be placed along the public tour line. About eleven other examples of modern art were in the Jackie Kennedy Garden (the companion garden to the Rose Garden). Bertha was twice life-size and was very naked. In addition, Bertha had enormous buttocks, far out of proportion to the rest of her body.

That is why the permanent White House staff named her Bertha, which was short for “Bertha’s Big Butt.” This is what the first lady considered appropriate for the eyes of the thousands and thousands of visitors who daily toured the White House—Bertha’s Big Butt…

Fast forward to one year later. Again I was asked to help decorate White House. I didn’t get it. There wasn’t much to do. The Clintons didn’t like tinsel—not one tree had any tinsel—nor was there any snow, nor did there seem to be much for decorators to do…

Perhaps Hillary didn’t trust us. She had, in fact, “hired” some volunteers of her own. While in New York, Hillary had seen an office she thought was well-decorated. She ordered the staff to find the decorators and bring them down.

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Her old Sunday school teacher just happens to show up at a rally (in Iowa, not Illinois, where one would expect her to be, being from Illinois and all) to "surprise" Hillary with a copy of her confirmation picture from 1959.

This woman wasn’t a plant, Hillary’s campaign insists.

Though she did, fortunately enough, contribute greatly and at just the right time to Hillary’s campaign to make herself seem likable. And human. As difficult as either those will be to achieve.

Clinton called on two audience members for questions, including Amy Fellows of Croton, Iowa, who asked, “Are you a Christian?”

“Yes I am,” said Hillary.

“OK, that’s really important to me. God be with you,” said Crofton.

“And also with you,” the senator answered. “I’m often asked what are the biggest influences in my life and what are the important commitments that kind of keep me going — my faith, my family, my friends, my work. I used to get asked fairly often if I was a praying person. I said yes, I was raised going to church, I’m a Methodist,” she said to applause. “I’m a very grateful and committed Methodist.”"

This same Sunday school teacher just happened to show up at a previous Hillary appearance, one in which she has been accused of planting questioners.

Hillary’s a good enough "committed Methodist" to know that God helps those who help themselves, and sometimes God’s blessed miracles require a bit of advanced planning and staging by His servants to pull off.

Source: Ace of Spades

How do you solve a problem like Bill Clinton? Eugene Robinson wonders whether it wouldn’t be easier to keep a wave upon the sand than to try to shoehorn him into a ceremonial post as First Spouse. Bill already acts as though the campaign exists to provide him a revival of the production most Americans thought had closed for good in January 2001:

Sexism might have something to do with the fact that Hillary Clinton has to answer questions about her husband that the other candidates never get asked about their wives. But Bill Clinton has always had a way of making himself the story, and he’s at it again.

When the Clintons made a campaign stop at an Iowa grocery store Tuesday, Hillary’s face said it all. She realized that Bill had departed from the script and wandered off to another part of the store, and cameras caught her scanning the aisles with a look of sheer terror. Bill was supposed to be at Hillary’s side; instead, he was way over yonder, giving an interview to "Entertainment Tonight." What was supposed to be a controlled photo op had suddenly turned into a happening.

Spontaneity gives ulcers to campaign staffers, but the supermarket stop got much more coverage than it would have if Bill had followed the script. He ended up drawing more attention to himself than the candidate — which is in keeping with his formal campaign speeches. On the stump, he draws big crowds and comes off as charming, eloquent and persuasive. But reporters who have tallied his words say that he talks more about himself than about his wife — at a ratio of about 9 to 1.

We’re about to get the 2-for-1 argument that we heard in 1992, but now the Clintons may disagree on who the one is. Bill seems much more focused on Bill rather than Hillary. This may explain why Hillary had Bill locked away for much of the early campaign, rather than upstaging her day after day on the trail.

Hillary’s problem is that she’s worse for her campaign than Bill. She has proven herself particularly inept at shaking off the image of a dragon lady, which might actually help in a general election, given the emphasis on national security. If she had campaigned like a Lady Thatcher for the US, it might even have been a positive. However, she spent most of the campaign vacillating on Iraq, Iran, and immigration, the latter of which sent her campaign into a tailspin. Tough sells, but wishy-washy and cranky does not.

Like it or not, Hillary needs Bill just to win the nomination, let alone winning a general election. Robinson points out that the necessity of Bill brings some very clear dangers. He showed that in his suggestion last week that Hillary would seek the counsel of George H W Bush, followed by the inexplicable suggestion that Poppy would go on a world tour with him to apologize for his son. The elder Bush, clearly annoyed with his new friend, reminded him that America had no need to apologize to anyone.

Bill’s a loose cannon — or in the words of the song, a flibbertigibbet with danger of becoming a clown at times. No one likes a clown for a chief spokesman, and voters may not want to put one in the White House, as First Spouse or otherwise.

Source: Captain’s Quarters

 Barack Obama took direct aim Thursday night at Hillary Clinton’s claim that she is the most electable Democrat in the presidential field, telling a New Hampshire crowd that the argument that “is being pushed, by the way, by a candidate who starts off with a 47 percent disapproval ratings.”

The remarks come days after a new Gallup survey found that Obama fared better than Clinton in head-to-head match-ups with the leading Republican candidates.

“I’m not going to mention names, but I mean the notion that a viability or an electability argument is being made by somebody who starts off with almost half the country not being able to vote for them doesn’t make sense,” the Illinois senator told a Portsmouth audience, according to a report in Foster’s Daily Democrat.

“For whatever reason I keep on defying this notion that somehow the American people are not ready for me. That just is not borne out,” he said.

Obama’s campaign has grown more aggressive in recent days, sending out press releases and mailers that directly take on senator’s chief rivals for the Democratic nomination.

Obama and Clinton were tied in the Granite State, but the New York senator has opened up a double-digit lead among primary voters there in the latest CNN poll, released this week, in large part because of major gains among older voters.

Last week, Bill Shaheen, Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign co-chairman, resigned after telling a reporter that she was more electable because Obama’s youthful drug use would be a target for Republicans in a general election contest.

Source: CNN

Headstrong, engaging, but frustratingly difficult to direct - those were the qualities that had the nuns in "The Sound of Music" at wit’s end trying to figure out how to deal with a novice by famously asking "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" Those are the same qualities that have members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign struggling to figure out how to deal with someone who’s no novice at all, the candidate’s husband, who just happens to be a former President. In many ways, Bill is her strongest asset, but his presence on the campaign trail also casts a shadow on her candidacy. How, and whether, Senator Clinton’s team can resolve that dilemma may have a lot to do with her chances.

During the past few weeks, Bill Clinton has been seen and heard a lot more, as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign tries to right itself from a series of difficulties and the increasingly common perception that she has squandered a huge lead in the race for the Democratic nomination for President. Bill has turned out far bigger crowds than Hillary was drawing on her own - maybe not Oprah Winfrey size audiences, but still strong showings for the parts of Iowa and New Hampshire that have become pivotal battlegrounds for a candidate who, just a few short weeks ago, was trying to appear so certain a pick as to be above the real rough and tumble.

But the crowds aren’t there for Hillary. And, unlike Oprah’s stumping for Barack Obama, it’s not clear that the ex-President’s goal is wholly to make the crowds into Hillary supporters. Perhaps fitting for a marriage that has raised its share of questions about embraces, Bill hasn’t completely embraced Hillary’s positions just as Hillary hasn’t fully embraced his. The goal from her side is to make it look like Hillary is the rightful heir to anything the public likes about Bill. From his side, the goal is part resurrection, part preservation, part transformation, and a lot of just enjoying the spotlight and living in the moment. Right now, Bill’s side is ahead on points.

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You can accuse the Hillary Clinton campaign of a lot of things, but overconfidence is not one of them. Not in Iowa. Not anymore.

Orders have come from the top of the campaign here that nobody is to predict that Hillary Clinton will win Iowa.

That may be part of the “expectations” game that all campaigns play.

Or it may be because the campaign no longer is really sure that Clinton will win.

In interviews with top Clinton staffers, who did not wish to be quoted directly, I was told that Clinton could survive a second-place finish in Iowa and that the state was not do-or-die for her.

Gordon Fischer, the former chair of the Iowa Democratic Party who is now backing Obama, says that attitude represents an “evolution.”

“The strong pitch made to me and others not that long ago was that we had to be for Hillary, because Hillary was going to be the inevitable winner,” Fischer told me. “They have come a long way if they now think Iowa is just survivable.”

Technically speaking, all the Democratic campaigns probably can survive a loss in Iowa on Jan. 3.

After all, the New Hampshire primary is only five days later. Why drop out before then?

But no campaign is underestimating the importance of Iowa.

And the top campaigns have been organizing on a level never seen before in the history of the state.

“Four years ago, John Kerry had the best organization,” Fischer said, “and I think his organization would be blown away by all the advances made by the campaigns this time. The level of sophistication, the micro-targeting, the staff and the field offices, they are not just a little bigger, but a lot bigger.”

For the major campaigns, the Iowa caucus is now a highly professionalized contest.

The top campaigns have ferociously smart people who understand Iowa and have the money to carry out their plans.

The degree of targeting to identify potential voters has reached incredible levels.

And all the campaigns have learned a lesson from the debacle of the Howard Dean campaign here in 2004: Never fool yourself about your level of support.

“Lying to the media is one thing,” one Democratic campaign staffer told me, “but lying to your own campaign can be fatal.”

The Clinton campaign, for example, tries not just to build support, but constantly to identify people who can no longer be depended upon.

It keeps track of a “flake rate” — those people who say they are going to show up and vote for Clinton, but probably are not — and a “churn rate," those people whose support ebbs and flows.

The bedrock of the Clinton campaign remains women, especially older women.

The Clinton campaign believes that women will solidly back Clinton while Barack Obama and John Edwards will split the male vote.

Fischer sees it somewhat differently. “Hillary’s ‘you-go-girl’ pitch is double-edged,” he says. “Some women are turned off by it, and she is still a polarizing figure among women as well as men.”

The Clinton campaign has made special plans geared toward getting female voters to the polls on caucus night, however.

All the well-financed campaigns provide rides to those who need them. (There is no absentee voting allowed in the caucus; you must show up to vote.)

But the Clinton campaign figures that some older women do not want to get into a car with a stranger at night.

So it has created a “buddy” program for volunteers to “adopt” two other voters and get them to the polls. The buddies will know their adoptees; they won’t be strangers.

The Clinton campaign tracks three general categories of voters: “proven” voters, who regularly caucus; “potential” voters, who vote in state and municipal primaries and general elections; and “expansion” voters, who have a very low probability of attending the caucus.

A campaign with limited resources would forget about the expansion voters and just go after the provens and potentials.

But the Clinton campaign has been sending out a special glossy mailing to expansion voters. On the bottom is a scratch card that says: “Itching for change? Show your support for Hillary. Scratch to win your special limited edition gift.”

When you scratch the card, you find out that you have won a travel mug. You mail the card in with your address, and the campaign sends you a free mug.

The campaign then follows up with a call, and if it gets a positive response, a volunteer will come knocking on your door.

“The idea isn’t to find out who wants a free mug; everyone wants a free mug,” a Clinton staffer said. “The idea is to see who is favorable to Hillary Clinton so we can begin a conversation with them.”

This is obviously a very expensive way to start a conversation and get a vote.

But the Clinton campaign has the money. And it doesn’t want to lose Iowa because it didn’t spend enough of it.

Source: The Politico